Out With Devils

Out with devils, In with fortune! Happy Setsubun! On the old lunar calendar, today is the official first day of spring.

You could have fooled me: these past couple of days have been crazy cold. Parts of Japan have seen ridiculous amounts of snow. Kitakami was hit hard last weekend, but most of that snow has since settled or melted again.

Good thing, too, because last weekend was Kitakami's yuki matsuri, or snow festival. The snow was slushy and heavy, so most people stayed inside the Sakurano Department store, but we clever and adventurous few ventured outside for two reasons:

1. Taiko and Onikenbai demonstrations
2. Tuna Butchering Demonstration

I caught some of the taiko performance. A local group of men were beating away at drums big and small, shouting and jumping in time to the music. I adore the sound of a taiko group: it is just quintessential Japanese! You instantly imagine old war lords, samurai, katana, banners, long wooden ships diving through the sea.

Across the street in the Sakurano parking lot, there were a few food stands set up selling minestrone soup, croquettes, and mochi. At the far end of the lot, a small sledding hill was full of children and neon toboggans which of course was why I was there.

No, not really. My main objective was the Tuna Butchering Demonstration!

In a large wooden crate filled with ice, a very large tuna gazed up at the sky. It had given its life and I wonder if it ever imagined it would be sitting in a snowy parking lot, waiting to be broken down into small, immaculate little cubes. I wonder if it ever thought it would leave the sea. I wonder if it thought.

Anyway, zen Senn is done. Back to the carnage.

There was a team of three men behind three tables under an awning. The first man made a big show of picking up the enormous fish and showing us the girth and announcing proudly how much it weighed and were it was caught.

He then carefully laid the fish on his table and brought out his knife. In a smooth and quick motion, he sliced right behind the gill. He flipped the leviathan over and then made another slice. Et voila! Fish head is removed and set on display!

While he continued to slice along one side, the fish's head stood watch over its own butchery.

With one large, fat filet removed, the second man stepped in. He took the tuna onto his station and began to clean off the skin and cut the meat into long rectangles. After cleaning and thinning out a few portions, he had about seven long slabs in a bin.

The bin was passed to the third man just as another filet was set before the second man. The third man's job was the most exacting: the slice perfectly even and matching pieces of the freshest sashimi you've ever seen. I was amazed at how fast and focused these men were!

And the tuna! The taste! The smell! It was incredible! People in the crowd gathered around another table, grabbed wooden chopsticks and dove into the sample plates. It was a small group so you could go back and get a few plates if you wanted. I had three and then I was starting to feel guilty for indulging so much, so I went back to the first table.

The first butcher was actually scraping tuna from the fish's ribs, ever little ounce, and piling it like tartare on plates. Here, children were just diving into the communal plates with their waribashi, just going to town. And I went right along with them.

Put that on the top of my list of things I'll miss about Japan: fish butchery demos.